Also note that there is something obviously culturally contingent about many famous fetishes, while men who take men to bed have existed in thousands of cultural contexts across thousands of years.
Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are. He analyses four “types” of homosexual behavior:
Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).
At one opposite extreme from romantic homosexuality is what I’ll call deprivation homosexuality – homoerotic behavior by men or women who are normally heterosexual but isolated from contact with the opposite sex for long periods of time. I won’t discuss this further in this essay except to note that for good analysis of what goes on in (for example) prisons, the difference between deprivation homosexuality and other kinds is significant.
We are generally aware of two other types of homosexual behavior. One is pederasty: homosexuality between adult men and adolescent or prepubescent boys in which the older partner is always, or nearly always, the one doing the penetrating. It is a significant datum, to which I’ll return later, that neither modern Western culture nor any other that I am aware of has a well-defined category equivalent to pederasty among women.
The last category I’ll discuss here is what I’ll call domination sex. In this kind of homoeroticism, penetration is equated with dominating or humiliating an inferior, the slave, the prisoner, the catamite, the helpless object. It is in this spirit that Sioux Indians threatened to rape the corpses of their defeated enemies, and gangsta rappers speak of “making him my bitch”. It provides the threat and the hostile charge when someone says “Fuck you.”
He goes on to say that for male homosexuality acceptance of the “romantic homosexuality” type is the exception, and by exception he means that
[he is] not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe
Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are.
“Models” of heterosexuality are also culturally contingent.
The essay is interesting but not altogether convincing. Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.
Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.
Not in the sense that Eric uses the term. In particular, he wouldn’t consider consensual homosexual relations between people of comparable ages in any way normal.
Eric Raymond has a good discussion here of just how culturally contingent models of homosexuality are. He analyses four “types” of homosexual behavior:
He goes on to say that for male homosexuality acceptance of the “romantic homosexuality” type is the exception, and by exception he means that
“Models” of heterosexuality are also culturally contingent.
The essay is interesting but not altogether convincing. Socrates would not recognize pederasty as a category distinct from romantic homosexuality, as the author does.
Not in the sense that Eric uses the term. In particular, he wouldn’t consider consensual homosexual relations between people of comparable ages in any way normal.
Your wording was ambiguous.